


From The Sky

by vorokis



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Selfcest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-18 04:22:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21505126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis/pseuds/vorokis
Summary: Vergil is looking into eyes that are far paler than they ought to be. An ethereal silver, like coronas neatly chiseled from moonlight. The lips have also changed, fuller now. The nose is finer. Himself, but not himself. An older iteration hailing from some other enigmatic future.
Relationships: Background Dante/Vergil, Vergil/Vergil (Devil May Cry)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 89





	From The Sky

**Author's Note:**

> For blessed Vergilcest week! I think "protected and loved" and/or "trust" fits this one. Apparently it's still the 24th in the US, so I'm pretending I'm American right now. (If it's not, shhhh, let me pretend I'm not late.)

They lie together, sweat-damp and indolent, on the bed, miles of naked skin weaved into a single tapestry. Sticky stains cool between them because they’ve sated themselves once already, moved together fast and savage in pursuit of scorching grazes of friction in between their hips and in between their mouths. 

Vergil is looking into eyes that are far paler than they ought to be. An ethereal silver, like coronas neatly chiseled from moonlight. The lips have also changed, fuller now. The nose is finer. Himself, but not himself. An older iteration hailing from some other enigmatic future. 

Naturally, he’d always thought only Dante could be the closest thing to him, the only other animal of their species, but now here is someone even closer, Vergil’s soul beneath their skin, his voice in their throat and bones in their body, his memories residing in their head. 

His other self bears Vergil's scrutiny with patience, seeming amused as he asks, "Are you picking me apart in your mind."

“It's what you would do if you were in my place," Vergil replies. 

His other self smiles a smile like compressed laughter. Vergil doesn’t need to hear it to know all of its notes.

"You don’t like being touched,” he says, stroking with his thumb where lashes cast softly spiked shadows upon his other self’s cheek. It’s an alien thing to him, his own sudden gentleness. The fact that he is still somehow capable of it. He'd considered it gone, a muscle neglected into deterioration and destined to never stir again.

He hadn't mourned its demise; Vergil isn't in the habit of mourning necessary sacrifices. 

“No,” his other self says. His hand is splayed on the small of Vergil’s back. The fingers skim over Vergil's spine sporadically. “Neither do you.”

“You kissed me first.”

“And you let me kiss you, even if you did point the Yamato at me at first.”

Vergil shrugs with one shoulder, unrepentant. He isn’t foolish enough to assume that an alternate version of himself would be an ally simply by virtue of being another him. “It was you who chose to walk forward and run her blade through your chest.”

“It took me closer to you. I can’t say I regret it.” 

His other self had never looked away from Vergil as he’d taken those steady steps, his face composed despite the hot stream of blood Vergil had felt slicking back onto his gloved hand by the time his other self had pressed his chest against the Yamato’s _tsuba_. The pain had seemed to mean nothing, while Vergil, reaching Vergil, tangling their breaths together, had seemed to mean everything. 

After that, the kiss—an assured, thorough seduction—and the relocation to Vergil’s temporary lodgings had only felt like natural steps. 

“You were always going to be different,” his other self says, his gaze still with that intelligent intensity, a perceptive discernment that turns Vergil vitreous under its attention. There is no possibility of running from it, hiding from it. 

There is no judgement, either. That gaze accepts him without question. It contains him easily within its bounds as if it's a space he will always belong inside. This, too, is alien. Vergil has hardly been understood before, let alone understood so fluently. 

Shifting his hand downwards, Vergil brushes his thumb along the softly stubbled line of a sculpted jaw, and then, more lightly, experimentally, he touches the skin just beneath, a single, ephemeral touch. Waits to see if his other self will glare at him, warn him off from the column of his throat, the forbidden ground that it is for any predator. 

His other self merely watches him silently. 

“You would allow me even this?” Vergil asks. “I wouldn’t do the same.” 

“You don’t need to. I wouldn't demand it of you.” 

“How accommodating you are.”

“As I said,” his other self murmurs, “you’re different.”

Vergil strokes down to where he can feel the pulse throbbing beneath thin skin, an echo of its beat housed in his own throat. He measures the steadiness of that throb, and the steadiness of what lies under it, too—power, leashed and idly lazing. Even as it pretends to sleep, Vergil can perceive the fatal truth of it: how sharply honed a weapon it is, the immensity of its lethality. The immensity in itself, as if it sits in his other self’s veins in place of blood, a surfeit that would spill out syrup-thick if you cut into him. 

Vergil breathes in the scent of it, its intoxicating weight settling heavy enough to cloud up his lungs, take up space at the back of his throat where he can taste its potency. It isn’t a threat, this power. It doesn’t bare its teeth at him and challenge him; it calls to him in some kind of recognition, wants him to come closer like it's hungry to know him. Climb into his veins also. 

“You want to see him, of course,” his other self determines just as Vergil thinks it, and in the next second the air shivers violently, thickens heavily, an unseen storm breaking with a crackle against Vergil’s skin. 

The shift occurs smooth and swift in a phosphorescent surge and blaze, the contained explosion chasing away pale skin and human fragility, leaving behind a winged creature of dark, metallic scales, molten aquamarine brightness. 

The hulking beast looms above Vergil, the danger of him palpable, inescapable, the closest anything demonic has gotten to Vergil in years without already falling dead at his feet, and though Vergil’s blood rustles, his teeth prickling, the corralled beast in him making itself known, he feels no fear. Only curiosity and intrigue and possessive desire. 

He reaches out to touch the ridges, the grooves, the horns. The iridescent harshness of plated scales and the gem-bright _V_ set deep into the chest. He cuts himself on the claws and the spectral sharpness of the bladed arms. Strokes the elaborate motifs adorning the underside of one broad wing as it curves over him; strokes along the tail when it curls, sinuous, towards his hand, its barbed tip glistening. 

This will one day be me, Vergil thinks, feeling the utter truth of it, as a clawed hand comes up, a sharp tip delicately ghosting beneath his chin, and then he declares it, meeting his other self’s vivid demon eyes: “Your power will one day be mine as well.” 

The scales and claws and vibrant light fade away like the retreat of a tide. Human again, his other self says, “This is not our father’s power, but something else entirely.”

“Meaning?”

“The fruit of the Qlipoth.”

Vergil pauses. He knows of the story, has encountered it in his research. The gargantuan hell tree that voraciously drinks human blood and blooms from it unparalleled power, its rise once paving Mundus’s path to the Underworld’s throne. “Why the Qlipoth and not the Temen-ni-gru?”

“Why not both,” his other self replies, sardonic. “But why either at all?” 

The words strike all the wrong chords, chiming discordantly. Vergil narrows his eyes. “What are you saying.”

“I’m saying that the cost of your path—what was once my path—is far too great and it will be for nothing in the end.” 

“So you are, what, a messenger thrown back in time to warn me? An inauspicious omen interpreting itself for me?” 

He can hear the curtness and the chips of ice in his own voice, but his other self remains untroubled by it. 

“I don’t have to be. Omens portend the future, but what was my future need not be yours.” 

The logical question, then, can only be: _What was your future._

Again, Vergil only needs to think it and it’s as if his other self has plucked the thought right out of Vergil's mind, the way his mouth thins, the way he pulls away without pulling away, some great shutter falling across his face, throwing everything into shadow. It's a blankness Vergil recognizes, identical as it is to his own and just as impenetrable, and it goes on as his other self refuses to speak.

He refuses to speak and his silence is his answer, Vergil realizes. His silence is eloquent, a communication on its own. It tells him succinctly: _unspeakable things happened_.

The impulse that hits Vergil next isn't rational. Isn't something he’s conscious of doing until he’s already doing it, his hand darting out towards his other self instinctively, seeking, searching for a—a wound. Wounds. Things bleeding that he can staunch with the palm of his hand and ease the pain. 

But there is nothing. There is nothing to hold back. The blood comes from a different kind of wound. A wound that is invisible and unreachable. 

Vergil's hand hangs there in mid-motion, trapped in the taut silence with the stillness of an animal preserved in amber. He feels abruptly foolish. He can’t parse what had overcome him. He only knows that his body acted alone, that it betrayed him, that this is what the human body does. It is treachery built out of skin and sinew, bone and muscle. The demon body never lies. It wears its brutal facts openly. Vergil can appreciate it for that at least. 

Brusquely, he pulls his hand back, but gets intercepted halfway through, his other self curling his fingers around Vergil’s. Bringing them to his lips. 

“Don't,” his other self says, "condemn yourself for it."

"For what?"

"For being more than the armor that you wear like a second skin.” 

Vergil calls on his own great shutter, turning his head away, throwing himself into shadow. “You're the last person I expected to hear such trite remarks from."

“I know.” 

“I hate that you know so much about me.”

“I know that, too."

Vergil makes a humorless noise. “I read recently that the augurs of ancient Rome looked to the flight of birds for their omens. It seems to me they're the ones who were more in need of meeting their future incarnations.” 

“Perhaps they did and thought it was a secret show of favor from their gods. Who is to say?" his other self replies. "The choice you can’t bring yourself to make, the impossible, unthinkable choice—that is the one you’ll need to choose. You’ll hate it. It’ll infuriate you. But in time, you’ll understand why. Why it has to be him.”

Vergil’s been waiting for this all evening and he still feels it like a blade to the chest. A hot rush of irritation courses through him, locks his jaw up. He turns his head back. It doesn’t help to see the shift in his other self’s face, a fondness emerging in it like a secret creature rising up to the surface from the deep. This fondness, Vergil knows intuitively, is for the other reality's Dante. 

He touches his other self’s face as if he could touch that emotion, the warmth in it, if it will sear into his fingertips and remain burning there. “How can you bear this?” he asks. “To be so exposed? Like an open wound in plain sight.” 

His other self is examining Vergil’s face in return, eyes lingering closely. “It’s strange,” he says, “to be on the receiving end of an expression that belongs to you. I hadn’t fully realized the viciousness of our judgment until now.” 

“Are you expecting an apology?”

“An apology would be even stranger. Ironically, my brother protests that I am still not sentimental enough.” 

“The two of you are together in your world.” 

His other self shakes his head. Makes a quiet and solemn admittance: “We’ve reconciled, but nothing more for now. It is a...work in progress.” 

“Yet you speak of him as if he is the only choice.” 

“Because he is.”

He can’t be, Vergil thinks. He doesn’t want to believe it. Doesn’t want to acknowledge it, the truth he'd felt in his bones when, months ago, something withered in his body had reawakened sharply the moment he'd caught sight of Dante alive, unharmed, beautifully phoenix-bright in his garish red coat. He wants to ignore how just that one glimpse had changed the ground beneath his feet, changed the rules of his world entirely. 

“That's why you feel compelled to sing his praises to me, is it.”

“The only thing I feel compelled to do,” his other self says easily, “is protect you.”

“Protect me from the unspeakable.” 

Vergil doesn’t mean it as a barb. It isn’t his intention for a tense silence to make its return and for his other self to go flat and barren in the face and the eyes, and still, still, his other self says, “If it's what you need, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything I can remember. Things I would not tell even my—especially my brother.”

Vergil sees answers shimmering on the horizon. Knowledge that would prove valuable, that he could arm himself with.

He sees blankness identical to his own. 

“No," he says. "I won’t demand it of you.”

His other self makes a small sound, a warm sound. “How accommodating,” he says. He still has yet to relinquish Vergil’s hand and he raises it to his lips again, in gratitude maybe, brushing over the knuckles, over the curl of Vergil's fingers, back over the knuckles again. 

Vergil watches, looking at the pursing of that plush mouth. Dimly crackling cinders in him flare back into more vibrant life. He tugs, once, beckoning, and his other self comes down to meet him without hesitation. Their mouths move for a long time. Minutes and minutes of soft, wet, drugging heat. His other self kisses him like each slide of his lips and every flick of his tongue against Vergil’s is a private prayer, a show of devotion. 

His mouth is a stamp of heat that sears Vergil’s skin everywhere it goes on to touch: his cheek, his jaw, the meeting place of his collarbones, the flat of his belly. His thighs, too, dragging sultry over the skin there before his tongue licks one slow stripe over the length of Vergil’s cock, teasing over the damp tip. His eyes never once look away from Vergil, as if to catch and memorize every moment, every reaction. 

Vergil’s lips part. His body thrums. Burns. He buries one hand into his other self’s disheveled hair and dishevels it some more. 

Then: a gently electric collision as his other self moves atop him, aligns their hips, presses down, and Vergil's breath stutters at the sleek slide of their cocks. Smoothly, they transition into an almost unbearably slow rocking against each other, and it's a perfect balance of give and take, the languid rolls of their hips sparking heat, sparking jolts of pleasure that shoot softly jagged through Vergil like lightning forks. 

All the while, they kiss endlessly, drinking in each low sound and small hitch in breath. Vergil runs his palms down the bridge of a spine, the map of a broad back. Digs his fingers into strong shoulders and arches up in search of more. 

“There is so much I want to say to you,” his other self whispers into Vergil’s mouth. “So much that you should know.” 

“Say it, then. Say what you can."

“You are perfect. You are perfect and you should be told so every day.” 

“Me,” Vergil says, laughing bleakly, even as something greedy rises up in him to snatch up those words covetously, deeming them his right, “with my anger and my vicious judgment? The terrible things I’ve done? Anyone else would say—”

“Anyone else,” his other self says, an edge to his voice for the first time tonight, “is insignificant. I know what you are. Who you are. I know you are alone. I know the world has been as cruel to you as it has desired. I know you want to survive above all. I just want you to know you aren’t as alone as you think you are. That there are other paths and you will find them.” 

"Sentiment," Vergil says, but his voice lacks any real venom, gets easily smothered by the tender crush of his other self's mouth capturing his. 

The end isn’t violent, explosive, like it sometimes can be. The bliss takes its time to diffuse leisurely, splintering into luxurious rivulets, a soft, simmering effervescence. Vergil comes without sound, just a breath shuddering out of his slackened mouth. He comes staring up into those moonlit, moonlight eyes, his muscles going taut and then easing, turning liquid with contentment. 

There’s no sound from his other self, either; just the wet spray of his release, a faint tremble of his body before it cedes to its own liquid contentment. 

Vergil breathes and breathes. Lets the seconds pass. Control comes back to him, wrapping soothing and cool around all the hot, heaving things in him. 

His other self doesn’t move and Vergil doesn’t ask him to and the twined braid of their slick-skinned bodies remains tightly twined. He counts the steady, hot gusts of his other self’s breath against his neck. 

The counting eventually gives way to, “He would not understand.” 

“No,” his other self says. “Not at first. Try at least. And try to understand him in return.”

When he does move at last, he pulls at Vergil to follow, and Vergil goes, falling into arms that fit right, fit secure, around him like the interlocking halves of a shield. A shelter he’d never expected to learn the existence of. He presses his forehead against his other self’s chest. Gives himself permission for the briefest moment to think: there is no place safer than right here. There will maybe never be another place as safe as this. 

He doesn't think about how he will lose it in a few days, if not a few hours. 

“Tired?” his other self asks. He’s dipped his head towards Vergil, breath stirring his hair. 

“No,” Vergil says. “It’s—” 

He’s simply calm. Settled. Something raw and worn in him that’s kept its eyes open and unblinking for years now is finally closing its lids. 

“Good,” his other self says, understanding, always understanding. “You should still sleep.” 

Vergil hears the unsaid: _While I’m still here_.

“You'll be gone when I wake.” 

“I’m sure I could use your help in trying to resolve my curious situation.” And then, uttered low as if trying to keep a secret from even the air: “You won’t wake alone.” 

So Vergil shuts his eyes. 

He hears a distant rumbling from beyond the window behind him on the far side of the room—the conspicuous purr of thunder. “ _Ex caelo_ ,” he murmurs into skin, and there’s another rumble, one much nearer to him, resounding against his forehead, the chuckle this time unconstrained. “On which side did the lightning flash?” Vergil asks. 

“The left. The best of the auspices, if I remember correctly.”

“Conveniently coinciding with your appearance.”

“Clearly the Roman gods want you to heed my words.” 

“Unfortunate,” Vergil says, “that I don’t believe in gods, only in myself.” 

“Doesn't it go to follow, then," his other self says, "that you must believe in me also.” Now he has buried his face in Vergil’s hair, his voice vibrating into Vergil’s body. He surrounds Vergil with his warmth, his scent, the refuge that he is. 

Vergil says nothing, listening to the muffled drone of thunder and the closer, serene melody of his other self's heart. It’s on the cusp of sleep, about to succumb to its draw readily for once, that he quietly allows, “It does.” 

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Title is from the meaning of _ex caelo_ and refers to the most significant auspice noted by ancient Roman augurs, i.e. thunder and lightning, i.e. the sexiest pillow-talk topic ever obv.
> 
> 2) More importantly: 5V3V RIGHTS!


End file.
